_Widget.connect performance is horrible

[Nathan Toone]

The connect uses an extra dojo.hitch in all cases - when it really isn't necessary. This really hurts performance, and in IE it is extremely poor.

A patch follows. Timings on my machine (prior to patching in parenthesis):

IE8 100 "onblur" connects - 16ms (31ms)
IE8 100 "ondijitclick" connects - 63ms (63ms)
IE8 all 200 disconnects - 16ms (16ms)
FF3 100 "onblur" connects - 13ms (20ms)
FF3 100 "ondijitclick" connects - 69ms (65ms)
FF3 all 200 disconnects - 20ms (17ms)

This yields nearly 50% improvement for the common case of non-'ondijitclick' connections. The "ondijitclick" function could probably be further refactored for better performance as well.

[Nathan Toone]

Patch and test case for _Widget.connect performance improvement

[bill]

Hmm, thanks for the patch/tests.... I agree that the dojo.hitch() is unneeded. Looks like someone was overzealous in byte shaving.

Although it does look like the patch is adding a lot of branching for ondijitclick vs onclick (changing the return type so you have to test if(dojo.isArray(c))), that might hurt us more than helping us, as it's increasing the code size.

In any case let's add this for 1.4.

[Nathan Toone]

Lower-risk patch which improves IE8 performance to 15, 47, and 16ms and FF3 performance to 13, 52, 16ms

[Nathan Toone]

Also - since we don't need the parameter normalization that's provided us by dojo.connect, we can speed up even more by calling dojo._connect directly.

[bill]

Talked to Nathan over email about previous comment. It means that dojo.connect adds (above and beyond dojo._connect) various function signatures - so that you can call either:

dojo.connect(obj, "fx", obj2, "fx2")
dojo.connect(obj, "fx", "fx2")

Since _Widget.connect always are calling it with 4 parameters, we can call into dojo._connect directly and avoid the array manipulation that comes with dojo.connect.

[bill]

Patch looks good to me.

[Nathan Toone]

(In [16901]) Fixes #8764 - add in some performance improvements to the connect function in _Widget.js !strict

[bill]

In [16933], fixed the code above.